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I'm interested in Mathematica's core language for both practical development and as an object of computer science study. Actually, the former is more of a means to the latter. I would like to create complete applications, but mainly to get experience and ideas for creating my own language. I have many ideas for it already, and one of them is to explore Mathematica's unique M-expression syntax, rule-based programming, and other interesting semantics. To this end, I have two questions:

  1. Is the language specification available anywhere? And are there any particularly significant resources on Mathematica as a language?

  2. Are there any legal restrictions on applications created and/or compiled with Mathematica, and if so, do they differ between offerings?

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This would be interesting to discuss in a chat room, but seems too broad and open-ended for a question on MMA.SE. – m_goldberg Dec 1 '12 at 5:33
@m_goldberg, I've trimmed my question. It's about as specific as I feel I can make it now. – jrajav Dec 1 '12 at 5:49
@Kiyura. It's much better with the edit. Per sub-question 1, AFAIK there is no current language specification publicly available. Per 2, I believe there are legal restrictions -- best read your license agreement. – m_goldberg Dec 1 '12 at 6:02
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I like looking at Wolfram scrap book images to see early origins of Mathematica. Here is version 0.0000001 of Mathematica stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/page2/#1981_smp . The SMP reference manual PDF is stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/page2/1981_smp/smp.ref.pdf – Nasser Dec 1 '12 at 11:51
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up vote 18 down vote accepted

The book Power Programming With Mathematica: The Kernel by David B. Wagner, McGraw-Hill, 1996, which proudly announces on its cover that it covers Mathematica 3, devotes Chapter 7 to expression evaluation. Although long out of print, it is the only publication I know of that gives a step-by-step description of how the Mathematica Kernel does its evaluation.

I'm sure the Kernel has changed a lot since Mathematica 3, but Wagner's discussion of the basics of expression evaluation might still be relevant.

Luckily the book can be obtained here.

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I think the above book should be made digital (PDF) and so others can read it, benefit from it, and share what is in it with others. What is the point of having good material, if no one can buy the book any where or read it or see it? seems like such a waste. Ofcourse Author must approve this first. (Like Leonid put his book on-line for everyone to learn from, which is really neat) – Nasser Dec 2 '12 at 1:46
Having the book available on-line as a downloadable PDF would be great. Unfortunately, some publishers don't see the value of doing this with their out-of-prnt titles and that seems to be the case here. – m_goldberg Dec 2 '12 at 1:51
Has anyone ever contacted McGraw-Hill to see if there is a mechanism in place to allow access to this text? I have often thought how nice it would be to have a copy, but none are to be had at this point. – Todd Allen Dec 3 '12 at 1:08
I can only tell, that it took me about a half year to find the book through a reseller. I have to say, it is one of my favorites. Back then, I even contacted the author but never got an reply. Therefore, I was checking every week and one day there was reseller on amazon. Lucky me ;-) – halirutan Dec 3 '12 at 16:39
@halirutan I tried to trace what happened to the author but did not succeed. Apparenty, he quit the Mathematica community very abruptly. Either he is not among the living (which I would not like to think), or something else happened which prompted him to quit. In any case, I was very lucky with the book, since I bought it from Amazon for 40 bucks back in 2004, when I just started programming in M (I started using M in 1997, but before 2004 I was only programming in it procedurally and rather occasionally). So, at the time I had no idea what I was buying - it was a pretty random purchase :) – Leonid Shifrin Dec 3 '12 at 16:59
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up vote 12 down vote

I think the best source would be the "core" section of the Mathematica built-in documentation. I have seen also people interested in Mathematica's semantics and power in discussion groups like Haskell, O'Caml and others.

IMHO all answers point to a simple rewrite model (as also said in the docu), for which, of course, Mathematica has its own flavour. As mentioned in the comments, it is likely that lots of those specific ideas in Mathematica are protected by Wolfram's copyright. But rewriting as a general programming/semantic model is not novel. I encourage you to visit http://haskell.org and http://clean.cs.ru.nl/ for more inspiration from high-level languages, or http://www.forth.org/ for the same in low-level programming.

Anyway, at the end, keep in mind that probably you may be able to implement Mathematica's basic rewrite model as described in the "core" part of the documentation in few weeks (I said it because I have read people claiming this,) but much of the power of Mathematica comes from the humongous amount of effort poured by Wolfram in the set of built-in rewrite rules, i.e. in what in a traditional programming language like Java or Ruby would be called "libraries" or "API".

Update: here you find the evaluation model/semantics in Mathematica (updated to latest) from Wolfram itself. If you want to understand how built-ins could be implemented see the languages I mentioned above: Clean is a nice example albeit probably too far as it also implements linear types...

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up vote 7 down vote

for a clear explanation of how the Mathematica (aka Wolfram) programming language works, see http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/5216/ it is available as both a pdf and as a Mathematica notebook.

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This is a great resource, thanks a lot! Not sure how I haven't stumbled on this before. – jrajav Apr 18 at 22:37

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